Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon Page B

which have a traditional sexual significance. Eve kneels, not to pray, but to seduce. Her left hand is suggestively entwined in that of the serpent, from whose fist several fruit protrude. Adam reaches greedily, with a claw-like hand, towards a bunch of figs in the shadowy leaves next to the mouth of the snake-woman, while his own genitals hang like fruit beside the mouth of Eve. The middle finger of Eve’s right hand is emphatically extended in a crude gesture and points down towards her own sex. Adam has turned into shadow, his face half-hidden in profile, to indicate that he has chosen the way of darkness. Eve’s outstretched arm is rhymed by the shape of the dead tree stump against which she reclines, to show that in reaching towards temptation she has embraced the world of mortality and forsaken eternal life. Both are depicted against an outcrop of barren rock, another stark symbol of death.
    In making Adam such an active figure, one who does not blindly follow Eve but vigorously reaches into the tree to pick the fruit himself, Michelangelo emphasises that the couple are implicated in a partnership of sin. The artist also stresses, by this means, that Adam has acted out of his own free will. Adam’s energies are Promethean in their unruly vigour. He does not only reach into the tree but also pulls its main branch down towards him. The gesture that he makes with the arm closest to the serpent, both stretching out and groping for the figs with the index finger of his right hand, is a graceless parody of the gesture with which God brought him into being in The Creation of Adam . This is the moment in the narrative of the ceiling when man seeks to take control of his own destiny, when he sets out to become, as the guileful serpent suggests, a god himself. The result is disaster. God’s pointing finger conjures life from nothing. But Adam, in reaching for divinity, conjures only the spectres of death and hardship, and condemns Man to a world of pain.
    In suggesting the complexity of Adam and Eve’s motives in this moment of Original Sin, Michelangelo indicates the multitude of evils encompassed within it – greed, treachery, God-defying insolence, a whole Pandora’s box of ill intentions. John Milton, who retold the story of the Fall of Man a century later in his epic poem Paradise Lost , never saw The Temptation and Expulsion . But Milton’s puritanically severe reflections on the nature of Original Sin, in a prose work entitled De Doctrina Christiana , set forth a view of the subject very close to that expressed in Michelangelo’s painting:
    If the circumstances of this crime are duly considered, it will be acknowledged to have been a most heinous offence, and a transgression of the whole law. For what sin can be named, that was not included in this one act? It comprehended at once distrust in the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility for the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring to divine attributes, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance . . . 6
    The other side of the painting, the bleak mirror image of Adam and Eve choosing sin, represents the moment of their punishment and belated remorse. An angel reaches out with a sword — a punitive gesture that rhymes cruelly with the enticing gesture of the serpent offering fruit — to expel the couple from the Garden of Eden. Adam’s face is twisted into a rictus of anguish, and he looks instantly older and more wizened, as though mortality has already begun to work its effects on his flesh. Eve has metamorphosed into a hideous caricature of her former seductive self, a lumpen, lumbering being — a member of the same